About The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee

Our selection committee consists of a handful of high school students. Onecontingent is in the Bay Area and a second is in Ann Arbor, Michigan.These students help Dave Eggers edit The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Daniel Gumbiner is the book's managing editor; Henry W. Leung and Jia Tolentinoare the assistant managing editors facilitating the committee in Michigan.

This collection, published by Houghton-Mifflin, compiles the country's best

fiction, journalism, essays, comics, and humor every year, and introduces

a large readership to dozens of new writers and publications.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading committee—comprising

students from dozens of different high schools—meets nearly every week of the

In response to our copious posts about dreaming..."Curious symptoms withal/for migrane: patterns moving/over surfaces, faint/ most often, fine designs/that would come as a kind of cobweb/ cast iridescent upon the others, a net/ intervening between me and them./ Lord! the things one sees when a fever-lit mind/ grants no middle distance./Prolixity of the real!/ And just when we are grateful/ for the dark, when night resumes us/comes prolixity/of what is unreal/ the melting waxworks of our sleep/called dreams. I am against dreams/ not being one to trust/memory to itself./ In my delirium, then, I had/ conviction of divided identity/ never ceasing to be two persons who/ever thwarted and opposed one another." Richard Howard, "November, 1889"